The SpaceX boss has envisioned people staying on the red planet in a
self-sustaining city in 20 years
Almost buried beneath a recent avalanche of rightwing invective posted by Elon
Musk on the platform he owns, X, was one eye-popping statement that made space
watchers sit up and take notice: an assertion that humans could land on Mars
within four years and be living there in a self-sustaining city in 20.
It seemed a fanciful boast, even by the standards of the SpaceX founder and
world’s richest man, who transformed the logistics and cost of shorter-duration,
near-to-Earth orbit space travel with his fleet of reusable Falcon rockets. The
US government space agency, Nasa, which is collaborating with SpaceX over
knowledge and technology to get astronauts to the red planet, believes a first
crewed landing by 2040 would be “audacious”.
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Tag - Space
In this primordial take on the life simulator, you bring about the creation of
an entire solar system
Meteors hurtling at planet-decimating speeds, luminous balls of hot gas, black
holes from which not even light can escape: outer space can fuel nightmares, yet
for Céline Veltman, a 28-year-old Dutch game-maker who spent her childhood
stargazing, it is the stuff of dreams. She’s translating this wide-eyed wonder
at the universe into a video game with the grandest of ambitions: the creation
of a solar system. Rocks collide with one another, chemical reactions occur: lo,
a planet – and life itself – is born in the depths of the cosmos.
The bright, illustrative visuals of Curiosmos are more children’s picture book
than Terrence Malick, an expression of Veltman’s aims for the project and its
moment of inception. “I want to make everyone as enthusiastic about space as I
am,” she says, talking ebulliently about supernovae and protoplanetary disks.
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Life on this planet is becoming er … awkward anyway
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